I’ve read a lot of spyware stories. This one stopped me for a second. A politician who investigated spyware abuses had his phone hacked with Pegasus spyware. Same tool. Same exact tool his committee spent two years picking apart. Not a similar product. Not a knockoff. The actual thing. Confirmed too, with real forensic evidence from Citizen Lab, the digital forensics group out of the University of Toronto. Also Read How Is Agentic AI Different from Traditional Chatbots?
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The Person We’re Talking About
Stelios Kouloglou. Former Greek MEP. Sat on the European Parliament’s PEGA Committee. Quick refresher if you haven’t followed this: PEGA got set up in 2022 to look into how EU governments were using Pegasus and similar tools against journalists, activists, and their own political rivals too, apparently. Citizen Lab went through Kouloglou’s iPhone. Found three separate infections. All while that inquiry was actively underway.
That’s the whole story, really, in one line. A politician who investigated spyware abuses became a target of that exact spyware, in the middle of investigating it. Not before he joined the committee. Not after it wrapped. During.
The Timing Is What Gets Me
First hack landed late October 2022. Right when committee members were hashing out drafts covering spyware abuses in Cyprus, Greece, Hungary, Poland, and Spain. Kouloglou also happened to be in the hospital around then, for a scheduled surgery of all things. So there’s a real chance whoever did this picked up more than his messages. Ambient audio. Conversations with visitors. That kind of thing.
Two more infections hit in early March 2023. A day apart. While he traveled from Athens to Brussels for hearings, right as the committee locked down its final report. A politician who investigated spyware abuses, getting hit again at exactly that moment? That’s not bad timing. That’s a pattern.
Kouloglou called the whole thing reckless when he talked to TechCrunch. One serving European lawmaker went further, calling it “a direct attack on the rule of law.” Also Read Best AI tools for small businesses in 2026
Nobody’s Named a Suspect
Citizen Lab hasn’t pinned this on a specific government. Which might be the most frustrating part of all of it. What they did find: the attacker reused an email address tied to an earlier campaign against journalists elsewhere in Europe. NSO Group, the company behind Pegasus, only licenses the software to governments. So that overlap suggests a customer with access across multiple EU countries, not just one.
Ron Deibert runs Citizen Lab. He’s called the case ironic, given who the target was. He’s also warned, more broadly, that an unregulated spyware market chips away at trust in democratic institutions, well beyond any one person’s privacy.
This Isn’t a One-Off
The case of this politician who investigated spyware abuses fits a pattern that’s been building for a while now. PEGA already published a report back in 2023. Concluded that Pegasus and similar tools had been misused across multiple EU member states. Called for tighter rules across the bloc. Almost none of that turned into binding law.
And the gap keeps showing up elsewhere. Leaked export records out of Bulgaria showed an NSO-linked firm shipping surveillance tech to intelligence agencies in Azerbaijan and the UAE. It’s not just Pegasus, either. There was a fake WhatsApp app, reportedly built for Italian law enforcement, doing basically the same kind of spying. Just cheaper. Less sophisticated. Also Read How to Recover Deleted Photos on iphone and Android?
Where Things Stand
Nobody outside Citizen Lab, and whoever actually ordered the hack, knows who’s really responsible. NSO hasn’t named a client. The European Commission hasn’t said much. But when a politician who investigated spyware abuses ends up surveilled by that same category of tool, that tells you something. About how little control anyone actually has over this industry right now.
Maybe this pushes EU lawmakers to finally pass something with real teeth. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it just becomes another entry in a growing pile of similar stories. Either way, it’s about as clean an example as you’ll find of a fear that keeps coming up around spyware: tools built to catch criminals have a habit of ending up pointed at the people trying to regulate them.